Page 473 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Representat ons of Race

Toward the end of the millennium, these continuing anxieties about the char-
acter of masculinity were evident in an expanding array of “pop-psychology”
paperbacks concerned with masculinity, by authors such as Anthony Clare and
Guy Corneau. As in the 1950s, fragmentation and the loss of a coherent sense
of what it means to be a man again became key themes. Nowhere are these
themes more evident than in the film Fight Club (1999). Here the key narra-
tive device involves the revelation that the two central male characters—Tyler
Durden (Brad Pitt) and the narrator (Edward Norton) are in fact one person;
that Durden is a projection of the narrator’s ideal of masculinity. Fight Club
presents a powerful metaphor for the loss of a sense of masculine identity that
characterizes contemporary debates about masculinity “in crisis.” The name of
Norton’s character is never revealed; he is known only by a number of pseud-
onyms and through a series of depersonalized emotions that he uses to refer to
himself—“I am Jack’s smirking revenge,” and so on—creating a strong impres-
sion of the loss of any sense of self. Although Fight Club ultimately restores
the narrator to a more normative masculinity by positioning him within a ro-
mantic couple—with its implications of family, stability, settling down, and so
on—most of the film provides a remarkable vision of the ambiguities that beset
contemporary masculinities and of the conflicts that follow from the loss of
clearly demarcated gender roles.

see also Body Image; Dating Shows; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, and
Queer Representations on TV; Narrative Power and Media Influence; Presiden-
tial Stagecraft and Militainment; Reality Television; Representations of Class;
Representations of Race; Representations of Women; Shock Jocks; Violence and
Media.

Further reading: Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Iden-
tity. New York: Routledge, 1990; Clare, Anthony. On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. Lon-
don: Arrow Books, 2001; Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in
the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997; Cohan, Steven, and Ina Rae
Hark. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. New York:
Routledge, 1993; Corneau, Guy. Absent Fathers, Lost Sons. Boston: Shambhala Publica-
tions, 1993; Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight
from Commitment. London: Pluto, 1983; Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999; McCann, Graham. Rebel Males: Clift, Brando and
Dean. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991; Osgerby, Bill. Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity,
Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern America. Oxford: Berg, 1991; Penley, Constance, and
Sharon Willis, eds. Male Trouble. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993;
Perchuk, Andrew, and Helaine Posner, eds. The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and
Representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Mike Chopra-Gant

rePresentations oF raCe

In the new millennium, in a country where discrimination based on race is
now illegal and visual culture is becoming more diverse, are racial depictions